IPv4 addresses used to be gratis. Today they're selling for ~40 USD each. Ford (!!) got 16.7 million IPs for free, hardly using them. Today they're worth $670M, a better value increase than any crypto currency. At the same time new ISPs can't be started because lack of IPs.

Apple also has 16.7 million IPs. And AT&T has the same. And the US postal service - they don't even deliver email (nor real mail anymore). The US DoD has 233M IPv4 addresses ($9B in market value). That's like 5% of all IPs ever available. And small ISPs struggle to get 250.

There is obviously a shortage of these IP addresses and the long term solution is to replace the whole internet with IPv6, which is not likely to happen anytime soon. Because: the ones that own the internet links that we need to connect to also own the IP addresses.

They're totally happy with renting out space that they paid (and pay) nothing for, for prices like 1 USD per month. Why would they help move to IPv6? Not happening. Short term solution to this is the obvious: force everyone not using their space to hand it over. What you can't use for 5 years into the future should just be handed back. Ban large ISPs from charging for IPv4 addresses to their downlinks.

This is a political problem. Politicians go on about helping the small companies and promoting digitalisations. Small companies can't even offer digital solutions not based on centralised services because of the most valuable resource is owned and controlled by someone else.